Colossal Biosciences’ efforts to bring back extinct animals like woolly mammoths and dire wolves have been likened to Jurassic Park.
CEO and co-founder Ben Lamb told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin at the CNBC AI Forum last week that he understands the comparisons.
“I think there were people who watched ‘Jurassic Park’ in the ’90s and didn’t think it was cool, just like you probably wouldn’t think it was very fun at a party,” Lamb joked. “But yes, I saw the movie. I loved it. It entertained us. It scared us.”
But Lamb said, “I always have to remind the people who are in ‘X’ that, you know, this is a movie.” “I don’t think Jurassic Park really had a model for conservation or general human benefit, so we tried to take a slightly different perspective.”
Since viable dinosaur DNA is no longer available, it is virtually impossible to bring back dinosaurs. But in addition to the dire wolf and woolly mammoth projects, Colossal is also working on genetically modifying animals such as the dodo bird, the Tasmanian tiger, and a giant bird called the moa.
“Over the next year or two, people will likely see us sending extinct species back to Earth, and we may even see more dire wolves,” Lamb told Boorstin.
The process of creating wolf pups involved harvesting genetic material from skulls and teeth that are tens of thousands of years old. Using an AI model, Colossal reconstructed the dire wolf’s genome using ancient DNA and mapped it to its closest living relative, the gray wolf. The team then created embryos by editing cells from modern gray wolves.
Three puppies named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi were born to a domestic dog used as a surrogate mother.
The genetically engineered wolf cubs Romulus and Remus were born in North Texas on October 1, 2024, one month after two of the three cubs successfully bred by Colossal Biosciences, billed as “the world’s only extinction eradication company,” by reconstructing their genomes from the ancient DNA of fossilized dire wolves, which went extinct more than 12,500 years ago.
Giant Bioscience | via Reuters
Boorstin pointed out that skeptics argue that they didn’t actually eliminate the dire wolf, but instead created a genetically modified gray wolf.
Lamb called this a “semantic argument” that “misses the forest for the trees.”
“Grey wolves are just genetically modified dire wolves. They were just done by nature or God or whatever way you want to classify them,” he said.
Colossal is working on a similar process with its woolly mammoth project, which involves genetically modifying Asian elephants. Lamb told Time magazine in August that the company aims to produce woolly mammoths in the 2030s.
“We call it the woolly mammoth,” he said. “Because if it looks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it performs the ecological functions of a duck, and from our perspective it’s a duck.”
Lamb became interested in the research after meeting with prominent Harvard geneticist George Church in 2019. George Church called Lamb “perhaps the father of synthetic biology.”
Church, who started the Personal Genome Project, told CNBC in 2021 that he had dreamed of bringing the woolly mammoth back for decades.
But the vision of bringing back animals like woolly mammoths goes far beyond creating a real-life Jurassic Park with previously extinct creatures.
“[The church]had a vision that we could leverage CRISPR and all these tools and technologies to bring back extinct species, and use some of those technologies in human medicine to build programmable models of life that could be applied to so many different use cases on Earth,” Lamb said.
These use cases include the conservation-focused benefits promised by the extinction of endangered species mentioned above. For example, engineered woolly mammoths could help fight climate change by trampling snowpack, mowing down trees, and converting heat-absorbing forests into grasslands in high-altitude arctic regions where the soil is frozen.
But the process of extinction is also opening new doors for genome engineering and developmental biology, Lamb said.
Ben Lamm, co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, speaks at the CNBC AI Forum in Dallas, Texas on October 1, 2026.
Carla Thorpe | CNBC
It could impact “everything from microbes to ocean plastics to gene therapy to targeted human medicine to eradicate genetic diseases,” he said. Lamb theorized that these efforts in DNA synthesis could even lead to the development of faster-growing crops and trees.
“We are pushing the limits of DNA synthesis and trying to synthesize the maximum amount of DNA,” he said. “It’s going to revolutionize the way we think about programmable life.”
Colossal’s spinoff company Astromech is entering what Lamb called “convergent evolution,” studying why species that are similar in almost every way have different immune and other health problems, such as why elephants get cancer at a fraction of the rate that humans do. The research could be used to solve human medical challenges and pandemic response, Lam said. According to D Magazine, Astromechs was valued at $2 billion as of March.
“We need these tools because we’re facing a biodiversity crisis and we’re going to lose about half of our biodiversity in the next 25 years. So we need cryopreservation, we need biobanks, we need genetic rescue, we need these kinds of tools,” Lam said. “If we use these models and consider evolutionary trends, it opens the door to what we can learn from them and how we can apply them to other use cases, how we can use directed evolution for everything from crops to human medicine and beyond.”
These efforts to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems make Colossal Biosciences attractive to investors. In July, the company announced a $200 million Series C round led by TWG Global, valuing it at $10.2 billion. In total, the company has raised more than $435 million since its founding.
But Lamb doesn’t forget that many people, especially young people, are inspired by the idea of bringing animals back from extinction. Lam said 30% of the company’s investors “come to us from their children.”
“If we can build a synthetic biology platform that can inspire the next generation and get them excited about science, education, and conservation and can be leveraged for so many different use cases, that’s the real mission here,” he said. “Our children will inherit our problems and our decisions about how to solve them.”
